


Loved and Unloved

by Aradeia



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: AU Electra kills Clytemnestra herself, Gen, Grief/Mourning, House of Atreus, Mothers and Daughters, Murder, Opinions on Helen of Troy expressed in text do not reflect author's opinions, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:28:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23866033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aradeia/pseuds/Aradeia
Summary: Electra felt evil, to hate her dead sister. Who could hate a girl all of twelve years, slaughtered at an altar? But that was the ugly truth.A character study of Clytemnestra and Electra, which ultimately leads to an AU in which Electra kills Clytemnestra by herself.
Relationships: Clytemnestra & Electra (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Clytemnestra & Iphigenia (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Electra & Iphigenia (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	1. Part I. Klytaimnestra

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote much of this piece for a classics course in college. I am mostly engaging with Aiskhylos' Agamemnon and Euripides' Elektra (which is where I took the title from-φίλα τε κοὐ φίλα [line 1230]). The relationship between Elektra and Klytaimnestra is so devastating. They are similar in so many ways.

∆

Part I. Klytaimnestra

Her life ended with Iphigeneia’s. There had been some other life before. Some other life she had shared with her husband and three children and it had been beautiful but then that husband of hers had slit her daughter’s throat and that life had bled out with her. There was nothing left now, save what meager vengeance she could claim for her daughter’s murder.

It wouldn’t be enough, she knew that. There was no justice for a crime so unnatural as a parent slaughtering his screaming, crying, begging child. There was no closure. There could never be. It was silly, really, to look for justice for a crime like this. Agamemnon could never be absolved of the bloodstains. There was no penance he could perform that would clean his hands. Not if he spent a hundred thousand lifetimes atoning. All he could do was die. And she would kill him. She would kill him for her murdered little girl. She would kill Agamemnon and his blood would warm her hands but it would not be enough. There was nothing she could do to him to match his crime. But still, she would appreciate the sight of him begging, of him tangled in her net, of his life oozing away. He could give her that at least. He owed her that. His life was a pittance for her daughter’s, but she would take whatever she could get from him.

People loved to whisper about her daughter’s murder. They whispered about why. How could he do it? How could he kill his daughter? These people disgusted her. What did it matter? What did it matter why? He’d killed her for wind. He’d killed her baby for wind because he wanted that wind to go to war and he wanted that war for a woman not worth a damn. Part of her hated Helen. Part of her always had. Helen so hungry for any attention she’d started herself a war and her daughter was the first to die for it. Helen who had abandoned her own daughter, her own Hermione, like she was nothing to her. What kind of mother, what kind of woman thought her daughter was nothing? Klytaimnestra could not understand that. Klytaimnestra could not understand her. Helen was no sister to her; she was a different creature entirely. And Klytaimnestra no longer cared. Not about her, about the war, about any of it, about anything at all. Agamemnon had murdered her daughter and the why didn’t matter because there was no why in the world behind an action so vile as murdering one’s own wailing child.

She had thought of killing him every day and every night. She and Aigisthos had it planned to the minute. Aigisthos hated Agamemnon as he hated every son of Atreus, but he loved her so that he was willing to let her strike the death blows. He was a good man, Aigisthos, whatever the gossips hissed about him. He understood horror, he understood grief like she did, what with his brothers eaten unknowingly by his father and his mother his raped sister. He was a true partner to her, her equal. They would share in the killing of Agamemnon as they had shared in everything else. They would lure him together, they would kill him together, and they would bury him together.

She and Aigisthos were hoping his funeral would provide them with some semblance of relief. With Agamemnon’s death, Orestes’ exile, and Menelaos missing at sea, they would end the house of Atreus in the male line. And it had to be ended. Atreus and his sons had done such unspeakable evil. They had done such evil that she did not have much hope that Agamemnon’s funeral would provide her with much comfort, but she was preparing for it in any case. She had woven him a magnificent shroud, red as his crimes. She had worked on it every day for ten years. It was long as a carpet and part of their lure. They’d welcome him home like a god and have him walk right into his shroud. It was an irony only she and Aigisthos would appreciate, but that was all that mattered.

A small part of her knew the funeral was a farce. Whatever Aigisthos said, they were not truly ending the house of Atreus as Orestes still lived, however far away. And she’d had no choice but to send him away. Aigisthos had such burning zeal against him, so Orestes wasn’t safe sharing a roof with him. But also his face pained her. He was his father’s only son. Agamemnon would live through him and his sons into perpetuity and that revolted her. She wanted every bit of Agamemnon scraped from the earth. The earth called out for it too. The earth could not suffer a man so polluted with such unholy crimes to live.

He had to die, and he would die soon. Outside her window, the beacons she’d built blazed. Troy had fallen. Agamemnon was sailing home to the fate he had sealed for himself. She would only have to wait a little while longer to hack out her vengeance. She had waited every day since Aulis. She could wait a few days more. Iphigeneia’s shade would not leave the underworld just because Agamemnon’s had entered it and Klytaimnestra knew this and she knew she would spend the rest of her life mourning for her daughter. But the sight of his blood, the smell of it, the taste, the heat of it–let it gush, let it burst, let him know her bottomless grief, her endless rage. Let her be heard. Let Iphigeneia be heard. Let the reckoning come. Klytaimnestra reached for her axe, the bronze of the blade glowing in the fury of her fires.


	2. Part II. Elektra

∆

Part II. Elektra

Her story, perhaps, began with Iphigeneia. When Elektra had been born, Iphigeneia had already spent seven summers in their parents’ love. When Iphigeneia died, Elektra lived in her shadow. Iphigeneia and her death engulfed Elektra entirely. There had never been any room for her.

She hadn’t had the words then, for the sick twisting in her stomach at every mention of her sister’s name. And her mother said her name all the time. It was an inescapable sound. _Iphigeneia. My Iphigeneia._ The halls rang with it, like a bell that never ceased clanging. Her mother would scream it at all hours of the day and deep into the night. She screamed it for years. Her name was the only word that left her mother’s mouth. Her mother would speak about the war, and Elektra would hear _my Iphigeneia_. Her mother would talk about her father at Troy, and Elektra would hear _my Iphigeneia_. Her mother would scold her for her poor needlework, and Elektra would hear _my Iphigeneia_. _My Iphigeneia, my Iphigeneia, my Iphigeneia_. Elektra hated the sound.

She felt evil, to hate her dead sister. Who could hate a girl all of twelve years, slaughtered at an altar? But that was the ugly truth. 

She hated to think of that time. Her father had left for Troy, and weeks later a messenger arrived summoning Klytaimnestra and Iphigeneia to Aulis. Elektra had no real memory of this herself. All she remembered was the flurry of excitement within the palace. Her father had secured the hand of Achilles for his eldest daughter, they were told. Achilles had been known even then as the greatest warrior of his generation, a rival to Herakles himself. He was an excellent match for Iphigeneia, and Elektra had seeped with envy. She had wanted her father to have offered her to the finest warrior of the Achaians. Elektra had wanted for herself all the fun and the fuss surrounding Iphigeneia, and their mother’s beaming joy. Iphigeneia had comforted her then, telling her that when the time came, their father would choose a fine husband for her as well, so that she could live esteemed amongst the well-born Achaian women. Her words–some of the precious few she could remember her sister ever telling her–had hardly soothed her then. As they set out for Aulis in a grand procession, Elektra had kicked and cried, left behind in the care of her governess. How dearly she had wanted to go with them.

As she grew older, Elektra began to take her sister’s words more seriously. Aigisthos had taken over the palace within minutes of her father’s departure, it felt. If there had been any hope for Klytaimnestra to reconcile with Agamemnon, Aigisthos had destroyed it. The two adulterers then plotted their ultimate betrayal of their great king, who fought for their glory so far from home. Orestes was perhaps the first casualty. They sent him away so young Elektra could not remember his face. And her they scorned. They treated her like an orphaned boarder in her own home and married her off to a peasant. But she remembered Iphigeneia’s words. Her father would return, and he would create a better life for her. He would find her a better husband, with rich lands and renown to his name. He would punish Klytaimnestra and Aigisthos for all the cruelties they had hurled onto her and Orestes. He would make things right, when he returned from Troy.

She remembered the night the beacons blazed outside her window, the message traveling swift as the wind gods to send them the glorious news of her father’s victory. Fierce joy had burned in her heart at the sight of the fires. At last, the day of reckoning! At last, the day of justice! At last, her father was coming home! All fortunes would change once he set down his foot on his own shores.

So naïve had she been then. She should have known better than to underestimate Klytaimnestra, who was nothing if not relentless.

In the end, she never got to see him alive. She had not even seen him dead. They covered his body in a heavy purple shroud and his face under a smiling golden mask, hiding the hideous wounds Klytaimnestra’s axe had struck deep all over his body. They had made a real butchery of him, the hero who conquered Troy. 

Klytaimnestra and Aigisthos had buried justice with him. But they were fools if they believed they could kick her away as they had when she’d been a child. She would not let them rest. She would not let their crimes against her father, against her brother, against Elektra herself go unpunished. Elektra burned with the grace of the avenging Furies. She knew what the gods demanded of her. She knew what must be done. Hers was the righteousness; it was time to get her knife.


	3. Part III. Reunion

∆

Part III. Reunion

Like a miracle, Orestes had come back to her, after all these lonely years. Orestes had returned and finally she could take back her life. They held each other and wept and then they had planned. He couldn’t kill his mother. He’d balked at the thought. Briefly, Elektra wondered where his rage was for the life that their mother stolen from him, from her, but truthfully it was for the best that he be elsewhere when the time came to kill her. They needed Orestes to kill Aigisthos as Elektra killed Klytaimnestra, and Elektra needed that last, precious moment with Klytaimnestra all to herself.

And so, when they were ready, Elektra had asked some women at the well to tell the queen that she was expecting a child and needed her advice. For ages now, Elektra had not been allowed to visit the palace herself. The women were more than happy to relay her message, and under an hour later, a woman told her Queen Klytaimnestra was on her way.

She arrived at Elektra’s hut in grand procession, borne in a litter and accompanied by several Trojan slave women. She remembered Klytaimnestra had complained of them, saying they were no recompense for her daughter’s blood. Everything always came back to Iphigeneia for Klytaimnestra.

The litter was lowered. “The queen!” announced one of the bearers. Elektra approached the litter as Klytaimnestra swung back its veil. A blaze whipped through her.

She blinked. “Mother, may I help you down?”

Klytaimnestra considered her. “I don’t need your help.” She stepped onto the ground, and her fate was sealed. The gods would soon enough get their due.

Klytaimnestra addressed her attendants. “All of you, set the horses to graze and come for me in an hour.”

Elektra led the short way to her hut. She opened the door for Klytaimnestra, who swept through it rather imperiously. Elektra stifled a laugh. It was clear Queen Klytaimnestra didn’t approve of such filth and squalor. Not for herself, at least.

Elektra closed the door and stood carefully in front of it. Not too close that Klytaimnestra would sense that she was blocking the door, but close enough that Klytaimnestra would have to get passed her to escape. And she would not escape. Neither she nor Elektra could escape the fate the gods demanded of them.

Klytaimnestra finished appraising the hut and turned to look at her. “Well, my dear, the women told me the news. You are expecting?” She gave a strained smile. Perhaps she was bitter her grandchild would come up in this hut, have a peasant farmer for a father.

“I am. The baby will come in the winter.”

“And you wanted my advice? On pregnancy, on birthing, on childrearing?”

“Yes.”

Klytaimnestra nodded. Elektra held her breath, waiting for her to speak.

“Dear Iphigeneia asked about children, too,” Klytaimnestra said, and her tenderness was a dagger to Elektra’s heart. “She wanted plenty of them, she told me on our way to the butcher’s block. How evil your father was to deny her that joy.”

Elektra snorted and smiled, choosing to ignore the jab to her father’s honor. “Are children joys to their parents?”

Klytaimnestra’s eyes narrowed. “Of course. To good parents. Not to your father.”

She chose to ignore that comment as well. “Are your children joys to you?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Elektra! Of course you are!”

“Is that why you sent Orestes away? Why you married me off to a peasant?”

Klytaimnestra huffed, growing red in the face. “Let me rephrase. You are a joy to me when you’re _not_ wailing.”

She shook her head sharply. “All I am is a wail. You reduced me to that.”

“Where do you get this from? This unrelenting bitterness. Iphigeneia was such a sweet girl. How can you be her sister?” She spoke with such outrage.

“I am less her sister, and more your daughter. You have mashed and molded me into your own ugly shape. I know this has always devastated you.”

Klytaimnestra’s mouth fell at her words. “And just what do you mean by that?”

“All you are is a mourner. All that matters to you is your dead daughter. How frustrating it must have been for you when I was a child to have had me around as a constant reminder of all that was taken from you. I know what you think of me, you told me all my life.” She now pitched her voice to mockingly mimic her mother’s. “Elektra cannot sing like Iphigeneia, Elektra cannot stitch like Iphigeneia, Elektra cannot dance like Iphigeneia, Elektra is not sweet like her.” She paused, panting. “You think me worse than her in every possible way. You had your perfect girl taken away, and you were left with _me_.”

Klytaimnestra stared at her like she’d never seen her before. “Daughter, you are raving.”

Elektra laughed. “I’m burning.”

Klytaimnestra shook her head. “You’re upset about your sister, of course you are. Of course.” Klytaimnestra always twisted things into something she could grasp. “But I see I have misunderstood. I thought you grieved her, as I did. And of course you do. But I see now how you envy her as well. This is natural for a little sister. Helen always admired me, she was always imitating me when we were children. And she was jealous of me. So jealous. I wed first, and better. That frustrated her tremendously. She was used to being the darling of the court, and the moment I took over everyone’s attentions she growled like a dog. But that was Helen, never satisfied unless her name was on everyone’s tongues. And look what she did to herself! She’ll be remembered forever as the bloody, slutty bitch who caused the war to end an age. But I know better. Helen can’t claim the war all on her own. I can’t stand to hear her name given as the sole cause for such a great war. Menelaos and Agamemnon deserve the true credit for that, not Helen. Well anyway, enough about her. You envy dear Iphigeneia as you grieve her. This is normal, truly. She was a wonderful girl. All the other girls admired her.”

Elektra stared at her for a moment. Elektra could not understand. How could Klytaimnestra be so utterly clueless? She spoke softly. “How can you understand me so little? You know what I feel like, every time I hear Iphigeneia’s name.”

Klytaimnestra stared at her blankly. She waited and waited but it was clear that Klytaimnestra simply did not understand. She whined as the silence stretched, her chest tight, and she grabbed fiercely at her hair. She was shaking, she was so close to bursting into flame.

“How can you not see what you’ve done to me? How can you not see what you’ve done? How? _How_?” She shut her eyes to see black instead of Klytaimnestra’s face. The moment was coming. She could feel it frantically racing closer.

Klytaimnestra shook her head. “What have I done to you? If I ever compared you to Iphigeneia–” she began, but Elektra laughed loudly, hysterically, as she denied what had been true for years and years. Klytaimnestra began again. “If I _ever_ compared you to Iphigeneia, it was only because I was and am a mother grieving for my murdered child! There is no recovering when your husband murders your child. Of course you reminded me of her. Everything reminded me of her! The sun, the rain; the spring, the winter. Grief has changed me, but surely you cannot blame me.”

“Don’t talk to me about grief!” Elektra screamed. “The moment you lost your daughter, I lost my mother! I’ve been grieving for you for nineteen years!”

Klytaimnestra’s face contorted in rage. “You–You _despicable_ girl! Everything is always about you, isn’t it? Even your sister’s murder you make about you. You _disgust_ me!”

Elektra saw red. Now. The time was now. Klytaimnestra came closer. She was going to the door. Elektra drew her knife.

Klytaimnestra skidded to a stop, gaping at the blade. “What is that? What are you doing?” she whispered.

“Fear not,” she breathed. “Your daughter will welcome you with open arms.”

They both screamed.

Elektra swung and struck the arm Klytaimnestra had thrown up to protect her face. Klytaimnestra cried and clutched her wound. “ _What is this? What are you doing?_ ” she screeched again.

She tried to back away but Elektra hounded her, stabbing at her chest, at her neck, at her arm, at anywhere, at everywhere, screaming and crying.

“Stop it!” Klytaimnestra screamed, falling to her knees, falling to the floor. “Stop it! Don’t kill your mother–I’m your mother–”

Elektra wailed. She stabbed deep into her mother’s heart. “I loved you!” she screamed. She pushed the blade deeper. “ _I loved you!_ I’ve _always_ loved you!”

Her mother coughed blood and stared blankly into her face. Elektra’s voice broke at the sight of her. She ripped the knife out and flung it aside. Blood gushed forth. Her mother’s dress was all stained red. Elektra sunk to her knees, keening. She gently gathered her mother in her arms. They were almost out of time.

“Why couldn’t you love me? Why couldn’t you?” she whispered, her voice broken. Klytaimnestra coughed again, and she was crying, and the tears mixed with blood on her face. She reached slowly with her last strength and pressed her trembling palm against Elektra’s cheek, her thumb brushing at a tear. Elektra heaved and covered her mother’s hand with her own. “I’ve always loved you, I love you, I love you, I do...” Her mother’s hand went slack beneath her own. Klytaimnestra lay still in her arms.

She wailed and wept as she pulled her mother’s lifeless body closer to her chest. She held her mother and rocked her. She smoothed her mother’s hair, brushed it away from her face, left blood smeared on her cheeks and her forehead and her lips. Elektra kissed her and kissed her and wept until her cries grew hoarse. Until all that was left was a keening sound.


End file.
